There is a long way to go before any sort of clinical application could be considered, but Macchiarini envisages that a scaffold seeded with neural cells could help people with neurodegenerative disease. The death of brain cells is what causes symptoms in conditions such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

It might also be possible one day to use transplants of bioengineered tissue to replace parts of the brain damaged, for example, by a gunshot, Macchiarini says, and to provide a matrix for native cells to grow into.

"We expect that a patient's central nervous system cells could migrate into the implanted scaffold, adhere to it, grow and contribute to neural tissue regeneration," he says.